#49 The Pittsburgh Community Land Bank: Fighting Blight and Revitalizing Neighborhoods

#49 The Pittsburgh Community Land Bank: Fighting Blight and Revitalizing Neighborhoods

Nearly 20 percent of properties in Pittsburgh are vacant or abandoned. To make matters worse, these vacant and abandoned properties are concentrated in a few neighborhoods throughout this city. Such a high concentration of empty homes can be devastating to a neighborhood, bringing down property values, increasing crime, and driving away small business. Fortunately, the General Assembly last year passed legislation allowing the creation of land banks in Pennsylvania. A land bank has the power to purchase vacant, abandoned, and tax delinquent property and put it in the hands of a private developer or city agency that will restore it and turn it into a neighborhood asset.

1. The Pittsburgh Community Land Bank

It is clear that Pittsburgh could benefit from a land bank to purchase blighted properties and create new housing and commercial development opportunities in the neighborhoods that need them most. My vision of a Pittsburgh Community Land Bank is one that is independent, targeted, and sustainable. First of all, our land bank must be independent. The most successful land banks in the country are those that are out of the control of elected or appointed politicians and are created as nonprofit organizations with their own independent board and staff members.

The Pittsburgh Community Land Bank should build on the work of existing organizations such as the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group and the North Side Fair Housing Coalition and should be run from the bottom up, not the top down. An independent land bank protects city taxpayers from liability, has its own sources of funding separate from those of the city and its authorities, and is buffered from political interference.

The Pittsburgh Community Land Bank’s work should be targeted to a few key goals such as reducing blight, providing housing opportunities, and streamlining the judicial process for property acquisition. The most successful land banks in the country are those that focus their work on a few key goals and set realistic targets.

The Pittsburgh Community Land Bank should be sustainable. The partnerships that are created to form the land bank should include organizations that are willing to provide dedicated, predictable streams of funding, especially in the first critical years of the land bank’s operation.

How do we know this won’t just turn into a handout to Buncher and other powerful developers? How can normal, middle class people benefit from this? It’s not sarcasm, I really want to know how I can be a part of this.

Darren Toth the best way to ensure that is to make sure the land bank is independent and not under the control of politicians. I envision a land bank that is community-led and community-driven, a nonprofit organization that hires its own board members, its own executive director, and its own staff. I’d like to work with organizations like PCRG and all of the community groups they represent to make that happen.

ELDI is a manual on how not to do it. Specifically the hundreds of houses and lots they own in East Liberty which are part of a gentrification onslought where indvidual homeowners can’t buy the house from ELDI, they buy from contractors where ELDI sets a hefty minimum price. I can see how that can be part of a strategy but there needs to way more balance in the mix and the notion of a non-profit with a for-profit arm has a particular stench to it.

[…] programs to rebuild our neighborhoods block by block. Coupled with the plan for creating the Pittsburgh Community Land Bank, we could create a mechanism by which the Land Bank buys up vacant and abandoned properties, […]